


Where The Streetlights Glow

by loverofthelight24



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Explicit Language, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Mentions of Allison Argent - Freeform, Mild Smut, Missing Scenes, Romance, brief mentions of past abuse, post 6a, slightly AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-22 08:12:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9595349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loverofthelight24/pseuds/loverofthelight24
Summary: “Please, Stiles,” she pleads, and it reminds him so much of when he found her at Eichen House months before that he wants to scream for her. “Please. I love you, and I’m sorry.”After that, there’s not much Stiles can say. All he can do is kiss her face, hold onto her and tell her he loves her, “so much Lydia, so so much” just the same as he did when he was in the third grade and try to prepare for loss just as he did at the ages of seven and seventeen.Except no amount of prior experience with bloodshed and death can prepare him for when Lydia gives one last violent shudder against his neck.“Be good,” she murmurs. “For me– please. You’re the one who always figures it out.”—Lydia Martin dies on a Tuesday night in January, wrapped in Stiles Stilinski’s arms while telling him she’s loved him all along.And this is the fallout.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Click [ this ](https://open.spotify.com/user/sydfair1996/playlist/4hRngjULS4WhJF39FGHFxN/) to listen to this fic's playlist while reading

**present.**

Stiles Stilinski has never been good at goodbyes.

It first comes up when he’s 7 years old and lying beside his mother and the mess of tubes attached to her body. His head on her shoulder, he’s using a green crayon to color the dinosaur he drew the day before when his mother begins to thrash, the heart monitor sounding wildly. The nurses and doctor sprint into the room, pushing a young Stiles into his heaving father. As the monitor’s sound grow stagnant and slow, the staff unknowingly swats his half-finished drawing onto the floor as drops of his mother’s blood taint the green of the dinosaur.

At the age of seven, Stiles lost his mother without a goodbye.

And at the age of seventeen, he lost Allison Argent in the same way; unaware, with someone he loved (loves) slumped and sobbing into the crook of his neck.

Stiles is now 18 years old, and just realizing that he has lost two of the most important people in his life without goodbyes, which would be the saddest predicament in the world to anyone outside the pack of Beacon Hills. However, it’s almost a constant for him. He and his friend’s lives are riddled with loss and devastation, and all they can do is hold on for dear life until the cycle that comes with it eventually passes for the time being. The denial erases, the confusion disappears, and the anger eventually mutes.

The sadness never leaves, however.

Scott smiles again, but every crease in his cheek is pale with the loss of sunlight that was her. Isaac sends them magnificent pictures and postcards from France, but he writes her initials in the corners of every card. Lydia banters, but it’s delivered like a chore since she knows she’ll never get to talk like that with her ever again. It never leaves any of them. For Stiles, it’s woven into every crack; good and bad, of his soul. Woven with green crayons and string belonging to the crossbow of a girl who left this world with it pulled between her fingers.

So yes, Stiles has never been good at goodbyes simply because he has never gotten to experience one. Until Lydia Martin dies on a Tuesday night in January.

_It’s quick._

Thirty-four minutes before, she and Stiles were attaching green string to various pictures and case files. It’s already a monumental day because until now, green has been a desolate color in a world full of constant red and the mood between the two is lighter. Lydia’s keeping her shoulder close against his own, while Stiles keeps his free hand settled on the small of her back, pausing occasionally to twist the strawberry blonde ends of her hair between his fingertips.

And he gets to laugh with her, poke fun at the way her teeth capture her bottom lip, even though they both know he loves it.

And she laughs back, smacking his shoulder lightly with the face of her knuckles. All is okay.

That is until Scott texts them about a pack of rogue, murderous omegas that have arrived Beacon Hills, and how Malia has pinpointed their location to be none other than the Nemeton. Everything is beautiful and fine until Lydia gives him a look with her eyes, trailing his arm with her pointer just as he’s about to tell her to curl up, put on his jersey, and watch Myth Busters in the sanctuary of his bed. Anything to get her to stay _here._

“Stiles, I’m going,” she states, already halfway out the door when she does so. “End of discussion.”

And it truly is the end of the discussion; he never being able to reject her in any sort of capacity is his downfall. And if he didn’t know it when he was eight years old and just discovering that strawberry blonde and green was his favorite color combination, he wants to thank God for being so fucking cruel by letting him know now when he’s eighteen, clutching Lydia in his arms as she bleeds onto the dirt below.

_It’s so damn quick._

The minute his jeep swerves into the woods, they are immersed in a bloodbath. Heaps of flesh scatter the ground, and Stiles thanks whatever lucky stars he has left that none of them are of the pack. He’s about to turn to Lydia, tell her to _stay in the jeep_ but she’s already in view of the passenger side window battling alongside Scott and Malia. He has no choice but to utter a few curse words to himself and grab the lacrosse stick in his trunk as a makeshift weapon.

So, he fights.

Granted, he is extraordinarily human compared to his friends so by the time the battle ends, there are numerous bruises and cuts marring his skin. He’s also fairly sure he has a wicked concussion, but he can see and count the five fingers on each hand and he’s alive. It’s eerily silent except for the heavy pants of the pack, and he breathes out a heavy sigh of relief when turns around and sees them; Malia, Scott, Liam, Mason, and Lydia.

But unlike the first four, Lydia isn’t standing seven feet behind him. She’s further away, sprawled on her stomach between two pine trees.

She’s nauseatingly still.

He hears both Scott and Malia howl his name, but that’s all he manages to seek out amongst the deafening sound of his heart pounding against his eardrums as he sprints to her. His legs are carrying him far more than his non-existent mental stability, because Lydia is sprawled on the ground with mangled limbs and she’s not _moving._

Skidding to a halt alongside her spine and immediately falling to his knees, he doesn’t hesitate to scoop her small body in his arms and run his fingers throughout her hair once he realizes she’s breathing his name against shoulder. Raggedly, yes, but breathing.

The solace doesn’t last long however, because his fingers are suddenly gleaming red in the moonlight after he reaches the ends of her hair. As he frantically casts his eyes downwards, everything becomes slow and meaningless. Nothing else is urgent anymore, because there’s a gaping series of fresh cuts under her left breast and there’s so much of _Lydia’s_ blood oozing out of them.

He doesn’t know what to expect when he speaks, but it’s something he never imagined he’d do tonight; he’s pleading with Lydia to keep breathing, to stay warm and alive in his arms. It terrifies him how naturally it spills out of his mouth.

“Lydia, hey– stay with me,” he pants as he clutches her wound in effort to contain the blood. It doesn’t work. Instead, it flows freely through the gaps of his fingers and coats both them and his green flannel red.

The same color combination he fell in love with is now something that’s killing her. He can’t think of a crueler, more repulsive oxymoron.

“Stiles,” she murmurs, her complexion growing more and more pallid with every breath. She quickly plasters on a strained smile to mask it, and Stiles wants to scream at her because she knows that he knows her better than that; he knows she’s dying.

Yet he’s still pressing on the gash on her chest, because there’s no way he isn’t going to try to save her. He’s done it plenty of times before, and he can do it again. He has to; saving Lydia Martin constitutes a colossal part of his genetic makeup at this point, something that makes Stiles _Stiles._ Without her, there is no him.

And he doesn’t even want to imagine what kind of hell his mind would enter if she died in the sanctity of his arms.

_He’s going to find out soon._

“It’s only a scratch,” he winces as he blatantly lies, the odor of iron and salt tainting his rambling mouth. “You’re going to be just fine, Lyds. Just fine–”

“Stiles,” she repeats, moving his hand from her wound to thread their fingers together. In any other time or place, he would happily comply in holding Lydia Martin’s hand. But not now. Not when the only thing keeping her here, tethered to him, are his hands that are slick with her own blood.

He tries to yank his hand back, to place it back on her ribs, but she’s clutching his fingers with whatever life she has within her so that he can’t. She has to realize that he’s looking at her like she’s fucking insane, because then she explains why she’s doing this in two short words.

_It’s not an explanation he’ll like._

“I knew. I knew this was going to happen,” she whispers, her voice and her heart growing fainter by the seconds. “That’s why I didn’t scream; I held it in.”

A broken sob sounds from his throat as angry tears burn the surface of his eyes. He wants to scream at her, tell her to stop talking such nonsense but it won’t come out. All he can ask her is _why._

“God, Lydia, why the fuck would you do this?”

“Had to…” a hiss emits from her mouth as she moves in a way that digs deeper into her gash. “–had to save you; all of you.”

“Our lives aren’t worth saving if you’re not in them!”

He has to choke back the bile rising in his throat because it’s a painful reminder that the Lydia who prowled in stilettos and attacked through lipstick stained lips is not the Lydia now. The Lydia now is one who calls Scott every Thursday night to talk about Allison, applies Malia’s makeup when the werecoyote can’t restrain her claws and sneaks into Stiles room at 2 a.m. and coaxes him with Star Wars references, intertwined hands and sentiments comprising of _“you’re not a monster, Stiles; you’re the one who always figures it out.”_

_The Lydia now is dying._

She doesn’t reply, and her eyes are growing glossier by the millisecond. Panic overwhelms every single one of his senses because she _has_ to keep talking.

_He’s not ready to live in a world where she stops._

“You can’t leave me, Lydia,” he whispers, voice drowning against her forehead. “I’m way too in love with you to let you go.”

The dulling green of her eyes brighten for a second, and he wishes he could see that on replay for the rest of his life even though he knows he’ll no longer be able to in a few short minutes.

“Y-you still?”

He wants to scold her for still not believing it when he’s told her god-knows how-many times, but her eyelids are fluttering, there’s blood leaking out the corners of her lips and something inside him begs not to waste these moments he has with her. Instead, he answers her by brushing her sweaty bangs out of her face so that he can kiss her there and whisper fatal sweet nothings against her forehead.

“I can’t do this, Lyds. Either I save you, or I go with you. There’s no in-between for me, okay?” he says almost calmly, but then he’s sputtering and choking when he realizes just how much her slow and stagnant heartbeat has reduced her to _this_.

“God I can’t do this, I can’t I can’t–”

“But Stiles, there is an in-between,” she interrupts, and he almost admires her tenacity until she’s sputtering up crimson from her throat. He doesn’t hesitate to wipe every inch of her lips and chin with his thumbs, continuously ignoring the acid of his stomach tainting his tongue. “There has to be. You aren’t leaving Scott or your dad for me.”

“Lydia–”

“Please, Stiles,” she pleads, and it reminds him so much of when he found her at Eichen House months before that he wants to scream for her. “ _Please._ I love you, and I’m sorry.”

After that, there’s not much Stiles can say. All he can do is kiss her face, hold onto her and tell her he loves her, “so much Lydia, so _so_ much” just the same as he did when he was in the third grade and try to prepare for loss just as he did at the ages of seven and seventeen.

Except no amount of prior experience with bloodshed and death can prepare him for when Lydia gives one last violent shudder against his neck.

“Be good,” she murmurs. “For me– _please._ You’re the one who always figures it out.”

And then her grip on Stiles’ hand falls limp, her eyes flutter shut, her heart stops and Lydia Martin dies at 10:43 on a Tuesday night in January.

Just as he predicted sophomore year, a part of Stiles dies alongside Lydia as well. It becomes even more visible when Scott, with anguish and tears marring his face, tries to pry Stiles off of her lifeless body but Stiles just wordlessly screams as he rocks her body back and forth; as if he can rock the life back into her.

He can’t, of course. He’s stupidly human, in-love and hollow. He’s supposed to be good for her, but all he can do is sob into her neck and experience the worst version of nostalgia imaginable as the flash of red and blue and harsh glare from the streetlights project onto her face like some sort of deranged kaleidoscope.

She’s here with him, but she’s warm and dead in his arms. Soon the effects of death will take over and she’ll be cold to the touch, as will him.

**_—_ **

**2012.**

“ _S_ ee, that’s the problem. You don’t care about getting hurt. But you know how I’ll feel? I’ll be devastated. And if you die, I will literally go out of my freakin’ mind.”

—

**present.**

All it took for Stiles Stilinski to get over his intense phobia of blood was holding Lydia Martin who was soaked in her own. He thinks that’s the most twisted crock of shit he’s ever come across. But it’s not bullshit; not particularly at least.

He’s no longer afraid of the possibility of waking up in a random place, drenched in blood. He can’t be afraid anymore when it has become a reality.

He spends every night suffocated in Lydia’s blood along a line of trees. It invades every fiber of his being, and he swears he can feel her last breath reverberate against his rib cage like it’s his own until the forest dissolves into the beige walls of the hospital. Lydia’s breath becomes his father’s against his ear, as he tries to restrain Stiles with his own arms from thrashing and screaming in the hospital bed.

Her blood turns into his own as strange hands inject him with Ativan, and the reality subsides again.

During his sedation, he dreams of montages of her ignoring him freshman year as he followed her every high-heeled step between class periods. He remembers the bruises that Jackson gave her that she concealed with makeup from everyone but him, and how he still saw _her_ despite them and the indifferent, trophy-girlfriend façade she tried so hard to make him believe.

Stiles never did.

He sees her with flowers in her hair on sticky July afternoons, with tears and mascara staining her cheeks after night-terrors, and with a pen behind her ear as she reads Tolstoy barefooted beneath his sheets on Sunday mornings. This is Lydia Martin to him; multifaceted, complex, undefinable yet beautiful. Always so goddamn beautiful to him.

He dreams of every possible way he’s seen Lydia Martin in his lifetime, and yet he neglects to remember his last memory of her; her last breath taken against him. But it’s 6:32 on a Friday morning, which is a few hours short of the three days since then and he still can’t bring himself to believe it wasn’t some PTSD-induced nightmare.

Instead, he relives those July afternoons and Sunday mornings as if they are the present and this is the past. It’s a dangerous fire he’s playing with, but it’s keeping him warm for now.

The drive back from the hospital is dull, and he can’t really explain why. His dad, clad in an unusually casual outfit of jeans and a t-shirt, is making jokes about the number of potholes on Beacon Hills’ roads (“should just rename them shitholes,” he jokes) as he taps his fingers on the steering wheel along to the beat of 90s rock sounding from the radio.

It’s perfectly routine and typical, but everything about it renders grey through Stiles’ periphery. It could very well be the heavy amount of sedatives he’s still being weaned off of, but he knows it’s much more than that. His dad knows this as well, because he can see him burning holes into the side of Stiles’ head whenever they’re stopped, as if he has no idea how to piece his son back together.

Stiles doesn’t blame him; he doesn’t have any idea himself.

“I have to go back to the station. Paperwork is piling up to my ears, and I still have to remove the barricade tape from, you know, the woods–”

He nods in response, already gripping onto the door handle so he can _getoutgetoutgetout._

“I’ll see you for dinner? I’ll get takeout on my way home. Almond chicken sound good?”

Another nod without eye contact. It seems like that’s all he’s capable of nowadays.

“Alright. Well son, I love you to death. You know that right?”

Death. Blood. Lydia’s blood. Red and green. Trees. Where Lydia died.

_Lydia is dead._

Muttering agreement, he gets out of the car before he can say “I love you” or anything else back, ignoring the Buick that doesn’t desert the driveway until Stiles is inside, safe and strange in his own home.

For an instant, everything is typical. The antique clock in the foyer ticks loudly, the time of 9:14 a.m. blinks green on the oven clock and the date on the kitchen calendar is consistent with the ones that were in the hospital. He trudges upstairs to his room, the normalcy suddenly making him very sleepy and the ache to bury himself in his comforter unusually tempting.

His room is the same. The walls are still painted the slate blue he chose when he was 10 years old and have numerous newspaper clippings plastered on them. His lacrosse gear is tossed in its usual spot near his closet and his hamper is overflowing with dirty clothes. Cosmetically speaking, all is okay.

Except his eye catches something that lets him know that everything isn’t okay before he slips into bed. He pads closer to his desk chair where it’s folded on and sinks on shaky knees when he brings it in his hands.

It’s Lydia’s cardigan. The red one that contrary to everything else in her closet, is a few years old because she refused to toss it away. All that consumes his mind is how it smells like vanilla and berries, like she’s still alive and breathing. But she’s not, because the last time he saw her is when she bled this same color from her chest onto his own.

“Red is just my color,” she would coincidentally repeat after Stiles told her one day that he liked it on her.

Now it truly is her color in the worst way possible.

His ragged breath is reverberating throughout every muscle of his body, his knees buckle beneath him and he can’t stomach the sight of it any longer. He breaks into a full-fledged wail and vomits on the cardigan, curling beside it as he has no strength to clean it up.

_LydiaisdeadLydiaisdeadLydiaisdead._

He still has so many responsibilities, so many different shoes to fill but he’s only eighteen and the loss stings like it’s stretched over a lifetime. The air thickens into something toxic and it feels _wrong_ to breathe it in. All he can do is sob into the carpet and feel his world plummet beneath him because she loved him. His 10-year plan didn’t have to stretch to fifteen.

But it’s going to have to, because Lydia Martin is dead and now he only wishes he was too.

**—**

**2004.**

_T_ here’s simpler times that consist of Stiles, Lydia and macaroni necklaces.

He’s halfway through third grade when Lydia Martin moves away from the trolley cars and golden bridges of San Francisco to the typical suburbia of Beacon Hills. Almost immediately, Stiles notices that she’s different.

First off, she’s a “redhead”, as Mandy Nelson and her tooth-gap taunt during Lydia’s first recess (stupid Mandy Nelson is wrong though; Lydia’s hair looks like the dark part of peach skins, not _red_ ). Secondly, she memorized every multiplication table up to 24 and always raises her hand prepared with a thorough, correct response in hand before their teacher can even finish saying the question.

And besides Scott, she’s the only one who isn’t afraid of his Polish name, spastic mouth, and dead mother.

“My dad’s a cop, so I’ll never get in trouble,” Stiles boasts one Friday, almost tripping on his too-baggy khakis as he walks home with Scott and Lydia. The three all live within a two block radius of each other.

Stiles likes to think Scott and Lydia were meant to be his friends, his _only_ friends.

“My dad is too and my mom’s a nurse,” Scott adds, pausing to use his inhaler so he can keep up. “So I’ll never get sick either.”

They’re all walking in perfect synchronization like any average day, but Lydia’s oddly quiet. Out of the entire month Stiles has known her, she hasn’t been the one to shy away from any conversation; always offering up her intelligent yet persistent two-cents.

While Scott and Stiles pander away at the debate of whom of the two “had better parents,” Lydia resorts to twisting the ends of her peach-skin colored hair between her fingers and staring at her Mary Janes as they scuff from the uneven sidewalk.

“What about you, Lydia? What do your mom and dad do?” Stiles pries, gently poking her arm with his beloved Star Wars pencil.

“My mom is a lawyer and so is my dad, so they fight a lot. Mostly with each other, though,” she says, shrugging nonchalantly.

“About what?” Scott asks. “My parents fight a lot too. Usually it’s because my dad leaves his beer bottles all over the front lawn. Is it like that?”

Lydia shakes her head vigorously.

“It’s either about money, or how my dad used to come into my room with warm milk at night. But I don’t remember that.”

Scott doesn’t notice, because he’s too busy fiddling with his inhaler but Stiles does. Like how he noticed how her hair is more than red, how her brain is more than their classmates and how she’s more than just a girl. Lydia is different from other kids; he just wasn’t aware how painfully different she was.

When the three eventually part ways for their respective neighborhoods and vow to dig up “treasure” the next day at the local park, Stiles can only think of one word to describe Lydia Martin to his dad and the empty chair at the dinner table permanently reserved for his mom.

_Beautiful._

Stiles sees a lamppost flickering near his house that night and orders his dad over meatloaf and potatoes to fix it. Only when he does so, he substitutes the streetlight with her name.

He likes to think it was accidental, except it’s not.

—

**present.**

The funeral is held Sunday morning, and it’s so Lydia-fashioned he could scream.

There are white hydrangea bouquets set throughout the perimeter of the service, and there are mauve ribbons tied in big, cascading bows around the flowers’ vases. It resembles Paris Fashion Week more so than a funeral, but he can’t find himself to throw a fit over it because it’s so _her._

“It’s what she would’ve wanted,” he overhears Ms. Martin sob to the Martin’s elderly neighbors, like some sad, trite closing statement on a newspaper obituary.

Again, he can’t be too specific about clichés when he’s currently living one.

The black suit he’s wearing is a _tad_ bit too short on the sleeves and its fabric stretches a _little_ too thinly across his chest, but it’s the suit that he wore to the dance with Lydia sophomore year and he spent half an hour simply staring at it hanging in his closet like it’s some sort of museum relic and damn it, he has to wear it.

They are greeted with specifically colored flowers at the start of the service; boutonnieres for Stiles, his dad, Scott, Argent, Liam and Mason and corsages for Malia, Melissa, Ms. Martin and her cousin Stacy. There are other scattered family members and old friends of a Lydia he infatuated himself with at one time, but Ms. Martin insists that the pack and only them should be the ones out of the 63 and growing guest list to wear them.

“It’s what Lydia would’ve wanted,” she repeats, as she pins the arrangement on his suit’s lapel. “I didn’t want to believe it at first, but… you were all the most important people in her life.”

The fact that her eyes are locked with his own as she announces this doesn’t pass him one bit. She’s tightly clutching the lapels of his suit with her throbbing fingers and her weary hazel eyes resemble Lydia’s so much, only at an age she’ll never have the chance to reach. It forces Stiles to swallow down the vomit that rises in his mouth.

The service begins and multiple, varying words are being said about Lydia; how she, “never missed a party,” according to Mandy Nelson. He almost marches up towards the platform to throttle her because even though she’s a girl, he’s not morally sound enough to say he wouldn’t harm anyone who treated Lydia like she’s less than what she is.

 _Was,_ he mentally corrects himself.

Yet, he remains uncharacteristically stoic in contrast to his typical, all-limbs-no-balance self and he feels Scott’s alpha hand on his shoulder in a borderline congratulatory manner on how, “great you’re doing Stiles, you’re doing _so_ well.”

(He’s not. He’s definitely not.)

When the priest resumes Mandy’s speech to lecture about reincarnation and Lydia’s place in it, he takes a break from his pain to study the boutonniere that’s starch against him. There’s no way it helps though, because his breath is shortening and quickening all at once, bile ascends in his throat again and he has to find ways to continue to breathe.

It’s an orange daylily, with a navy blue ribbon tied around the stem.

His hands are clammy with sweat and he wants to use them to remove every petal like an old playground ritual of she loves me/she loves me not, except he wants to rip it in the exact pattern his heart follows because _orange and blue? Not a good combination._

But he leaves it on and balls his shaky fists in the depths of his pants pockets, due to the fact that _sometimes there’s other things you wouldn’t think would be a good combination end up turning out to be, like, a perfect combination, you know–_

And he finally glances over at the mahogany casket displayed in front of the priest that certainly has Lydia trapped dead inside of it, and now has to comprehend the once inevitable.

_Like two people together._

He stumbles backwards, ripping the boutonniere off his suit as if that action alone will remove any remnants of Lydia off of him. But when his mind becomes swarmed with images of her bloody and slack corpse against his chest, he’s reminded that she believed that he was the one who “always figured it out”, yet he was right there with her and he still couldn’t figure out how to keep her alive.

“Be good,” she told him with her very last breath.

_But how can I be good without you, Lydia?_

And then he knows that he can’t do this. They’re starting to lower her into the ground, he can hear Ms. Martin’s wails from behind him and he _can’t_ fucking do this. Both his dad and Scott bellow his name, but he can’t stand there pretending like he’s a casual onlooker, attending her funeral just to play nice among the community when her death has literally molded him and his world into something pathetic and raw.

He loses count of his fingers, his mind is hazy with death and he trips over more than a few roots of the cemetery’s oak trees, but he ends up finding a granite mausoleum to sink against. He opens his fist to reveal the orange and blue arrangement in his hand and the only reaction he can manage is to cry and choke on the air that he’s living off of, and that Lydia is not.

“Stiles?”

He almost jumps at the sudden calling of his name, but somewhat relaxes when he discovers that the source of the voice isn’t his dad or Scott.

“Jesus, Malia. You scared the shit out of me.”

She’s standing a few yards away from him, with her arms crossed awkwardly against a black jersey dress, a crop leather jacket, and matching combat boots digging into the grass.

“What are you doing here?”

“Well, it is a funeral service–”

She steps closer to him, squinting at him from both the blinding sunlight and disbelief.

“You know what I mean. Why are you sitting behind a mausoleum?”

“It’s actually pretty comfy, you can pop a squat here if you want–”

He’s reverting to his old self to prove a point: that he’s not hurting, that he’s fine and as silly and Stiles-like as ever. Except that it’s a lie, and Malia can see (and smell) right past it.

“You’re not really sitting here because it’s comfortable, right?”

He sighs, not knowing why he tried in the first place.

“No, no I’m not.”

There’s a long, pregnant pause before she sighs, giving in when she walks over and sits next to him.

“That makes two of us.”

He glances at her only briefly, taking in her short hair and stony expression before she slides her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket, unveiling a round glass bottle soon after.

“A pint of Jack? You can’t even get drunk.”

“No, but you can.”

He squints at her, as if he’s missing something vitally important in the casual way she says it.

“And why would I need to get drunk?”

“From what I remember, my dad would always drink whiskey after a ‘long day of work.’ So I figured you could use it.”

“No offense Mal, but this isn’t exactly equivalent to a long day of work.”

“Sure it is. Work equals Beacon Hills, and it’s been one long fucking day.”

She silences him for a few moments, as he’s unable to come up with any sort of snarky response.

“Can’t argue with that logic.”

It’s quiet again, the clinking of the glass against the zippers of Malia’s boots and multiple funeral processions entering the cemetery being the only sounds to disrupt it. But Stiles can’t keep silent for long when he glances over and catches Malia’s complexion.

“Um, your makeup looks… nice?”

It’s relatively tame to what Stiles would usually comment, because her makeup is a complete chaos of gold glitter, black ink, and too-pink of blush. Malia must know it, because she doesn’t even try to obsessively scour for a mirror. She only groans and simultaneously shrugs in contradiction.

“I know it sucks, but Lydia would always do it for me for special occasions and shit. I figured I would try to do it myself because you know, it’s a special occasion and it’s for Lydia.”

_It’s for Lydia._

It’s the first time since her death that he’s wanted to smile instead of scream when he hears her name.

“That’s really awesome of you, Malia.”

She shrugs, bringing the liquor to her lips and taking a large swig as she does so.

“Well, she helped me a lot. She helped me get over you, you know.”

“Really? How?”

She doesn’t even look at him when she holds out the pint to him, as if she won’t give him the answer until he takes it off her hands. He hesitates for a bit, until he hastily takes it from her and drinks it for five seconds, wincing and gagging at the burn constricting his throat.

“Honestly? Just by reading her chemo signals and listening to her heartbeat,” she says. “Even when I tried to deny it, I knew deep down that it had always been her for you. The same went for Lydia. At least as long as I’ve been around, she’s been in love with you too, Stiles.”

He wants to correct her, reprimand her for the painful reminder of when Lydia told him she loves him seconds before she died in his arms, but he stills when he realizes the magnitude of Malia’s words.

_As long as I’ve been around, she’s been in love with you too, Stiles._

He has to take a few more pulls of the whiskey so he can avoid delving into just how many moments he missed with Lydia.

“That’s why you can’t be there, right? Because it hurts too much?”

Right.

“It just feels like– there’s a huge pile of bricks weighing on my chest every time I try to so much as breathe without her,” he explains, tapping his fingers against his thigh erratically. “When I was back there, the only thing I was thinking about was joining her six feet under.”

“You’d die from suffocation.”

He scoffs, knocking his head back against the granite as he peers up at the sky.

“It’s not like it’s much different from now; at least I’d be dead too.”

Without any sort of pretense, Malia wraps her arms around him in a bear hug, nuzzling her head in his neck as Stiles visibly stiffens.

“Uh–?”

“When coyotes deal with trauma, they need constant contact and affection until they can be released into the wild,” she murmurs into his neck. “I’m hugging you because like a coyote, you need support until you can get back out there; and alcohol.”

He almost hugs her back, because he’s so desperate to openly cry and be the one to collapse in someone’s arms for a change because it’s _so_ fucking painful. But he can’t. His walls won’t allow him, but at least he now has some personal knowledge on how Lydia Martin dealt with her pain for the first sixteen of the eighteen years of her life.

“Let’s just stick to alcohol right now,” he says, reaching over and grabbing the alcohol bottle from between her legs. “Sound good?”

Malia nods in understanding, even when he knows that she doesn’t fully understand. He’s grateful for it.

“Hey Stiles?”

“Yeah?”

“Just don’t stray too far from the pack, alright?” she asks, her voice wavering in a way that makes her sound both powerful and powerless. “We need you, even if you think you don’t need us.”

And he nods. It’s what he does best now; acknowledging without promising anything. He doesn’t want to give himself too much credit, because right now the whiskey is the best burn he’s felt in a while and he can’t forfeit something that’s making him feel the closest thing to being alive since Lydia was here alongside him.

—

**2012.**

“ _Y_ ou see, death doesn't happen to you, Lydia. It happens to everyone around you. To all the people left standing at your funeral, wondering how they’re going to live their lives now without you in it.”

—

**present.**

Stiles broadens his taste in liquor after her funeral.

It’s strictly vodka and whiskey at first, since that’s all that inhabits his dad’s liquor cabinet. The cabinet has been dusty and untouched by his dad’s hands for years, so he assumes it’s a safe bet to continue secretly drinking from that.

He does this until Malia, being relatively new to human ethics and all, starts to supply him with new brands and types of liquor. Lord knows how she manages to get it, but Stiles doesn’t even care to question.

“As long as it helps you cope,” she says each time she drops off the alcohol in an inconspicuous cardboard box next to his bed, since Stiles hasn’t left his bed since Lydia was buried in a box of her own.

And it _does_ help him cope, a bit. It numbs him, making the ragged edges of pain smooth and blur in his brain until he’s slurring and incoherent. Stiles has half the mind to hide all the empty bottles underneath his bed so when his dad arrives from dead-ended, late-nights at the police station, he only sees Stiles snoring and drooling on his pillow.

He doesn’t know that his drool is more alcohol than spit, however.

On the seventeenth night since the Tuesday night, Stiles opens the last of the twenty-bottle deep box Malia gave him. It’s a fifth of Tequila Rose Strawberry Cream liqueur. He downs it before he can start thinking about strawberry blonde hair and how his father became an alcoholic when his mother died.

—

**Late 2013.**

_H_ e was forgotten.

That’s all he can think about, even when Scott tackled him to ground once he came back to Beacon Hills, when his dad didn’t let him go for about a half an hour or when Lydia tentatively walked towards him and fell slack against his chest as she wept about just how real the possibility of him not coming back was.

He embraces them all back with equal fervor and relief that he _did_ come back to them, but his anxiety doesn’t slow down whatsoever because he was so marginally close to remaining forgotten and trapped in a fictional realm for the remainder of his life. It renders him silent, and he knows that they’re all wondering if something was chemically altered within him during his rescue because Mieczyslaw ‘Stiles’ Stilinski is not a proponent of passivity.

He finds himself becoming one though, because _what if_ Scott doesn’t remember sophomore year camp-outs in the preserve with stolen liquor from his dad’s cabinet?

 _What if_ his dad doesn’t remember complaining about the unsalted, unbuttered popcorn Stiles would make for him during their monthly John Wayne marathons?

And _what if_ Lydia doesn’t remember that she was the first girl he ever danced with at the winter formal, because he reserved that spot for her long before then?

The what-ifs are battling against the “I missed you’s” and “I love you’s” searing the inside of his throat, and it rages on when Lydia and Stiles are piled into the back of the jeep as Scott drives towards Stiles’ house.  He can feel Lydia clinging onto him, her head nestling into the crook of his neck but he doesn’t do the same because _whatifwhatifwhatif_.

The jeep halts abruptly and Stiles is mentally conscious enough to hear the other two’s exchange.

“You’re staying with him tonight, right?”

“Do you expect me to do otherwise?”

He detects a slight smirk in Scott’s voice.

“It was a rhetorical question, Lydia.”

It strikes a familiar chord within him, one that’s painted red, orange and blue all at once. She ignores Scott in effort to stop the bright red blush that’s spreading across her cheeks, but this is all unknown to Stiles whose borderline catatonic next to her.

“How are you getting home?”

“I left my bike in the garage a few months ago, before–”

They all know what he means, so he doesn’t repeat it. It’s too fresh of a wound to dig deeper into.

“I got it, Scott. I’ll call you if anything happens.”

“Okay, I’ll be back tomorrow,” Scott promises, before adding: “And please Lydia, don’t forget to take care of yourself too.”

And with that he’s ushered out of the vehicle, bare feet mindlessly padding against the concrete of his front steps with Lydia’s arm looped around him, steadying him as they enter his house.

He recognizes every mark of both professional and shoddy craftsmanship, remembers his morning routine just by passing the bathroom and can recall the sleepless nights he and Lydia spent psychoanalyzing the crime board in his bedroom, yet he feels like an unwelcome stranger. Somehow though, he feels more at home with Lydia’s hand on his own than he does in the house he spent his entire life living in.

‘Emotional tethers’ and whatnot.

“Will you be okay if I go change in the bathroom for a second?”

He peers over, suddenly aware that they’re both sitting on the foot of his bed with Lydia’s face close to his own. Her eyes are glossy with green and unshed tears and her mouth quirks up in a heavy smile when he looks at her. It reminds him of the times when he would instantly brighten at any recognition from Lydia Martin whatsoever, when she would forget who Stiles was on a daily basis.

He despises how it wasn’t much different up until an hour ago.

He nods yes and she tightly winds their fingers together for a moment before she begins to rummage through his drawers in search of lighter clothes. Watching as she crouches on the floor, he notices how her chest rises and falls against the floral material of her romper. Her fingers trace around a particular article of clothing, almost in awe, before she balls up the flash of red in her hands and heads into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

He spends the few minutes he has alone to be truly as such. He inspects all the artifacts in his room from his position on the bed, his legs far too shaky to support him. There’s a part of him that can recall everything about his surroundings; the scattered pencil marks on his doorframe marking his height throughout his lifetime, the black and white picture of Allison and Lydia grinning in the bleachers at a lacrosse game and the red yarn unraveled on the floor all render distinctively familiar to him.

The other part of him, however, still questions if he’s truly _here_. If he hasn’t entered another dimension where the outcome was this and there’s one out there where he’s still forgotten. It feels achingly similar to the aftermath of the Nogitsune, where he was told over and over again that “it wasn’t his fault,” even though Lydia instinctively flinched in his presence and Scott looked everywhere but in his eyes.

_Whatifwhatifwhatif–_

The bathroom door opens and his breath catches somewhere between his throat and stomach when Lydia steps out from it. She’s wearing his lacrosse jersey, the number “24” emblazoned across her chest, and apparently nothing else as it falls midway on her milky thighs. It’s then that the habitual ache of wanting to press kisses to them and the rest of her resounds through him, and suddenly he finds himself wrecked and raw because _this_ is what he missed.

“Lydia,” he pants, wanting her to get to him so much that he doesn’t find it in him to care just how desperate he sounds. _“Lydia–”_

Her eyes widen at how he’s pleading for her and she's there. She’s standing between the open cavern of his legs, letting the maroon fabric pool around her as she places both hands on either side of his face.

“Stiles, hey,” she coos, smoothing his hair down. “It’s okay, we’re here together. No one is anywhere else.”

“You forgot me,” he babbles as sobs deplete the movements of his body, causing him to lean his head against her navel and wraps his hands on the backs of her knees. “I was gone and Scott forgot everything about me. My dad forgot he had a son, and you forgot _me_.”

She lets him wallow for a few minutes as she cards her fingers through his hair and leans into his touch. His jersey already smells like it’s a part of her now, raspberries and vanilla combined with mint and sweat, and he unconsciously strokes the back of her knees because he spent almost a month without her and this is a small way of making up for it.

It’s all invading him at once; her, being forgotten, her, feeling foreign in his own home, and her. But she soothes it when she tilts his chin away from her midsection and upwards, locking their eyes together as her breath flutters against his lips. They’re close again.

“Stiles, I want to make something very, _very_ clear, alright?”

He nods again, but she doesn’t wait for him to stop when she speaks.

“Even when I forgot you, I still remembered parts of you,” she deducts, as if she’s just now realizing it herself with his jaw feeble in her hands. “I remembered how I was supposed to meet someone at the lockers before school every morning. I remembered spending nights connecting string to pictures of things that didn’t make sense and feeling empty when I did it alone, trying to find you. I remembered being so unrequitedly loved by someone and missing it.”

His breath now catches definitively in his throat, releasing it by saying her name.

“Lydia…”

“I remember you touching me,” she says, trailing her fingers down the column of his neck and dragging his other hand under his jersey, past the bare expanse of her midriff until his fingers are skimming the underside of her bare breasts.

He doesn’t remember ever touching her like this, but there’s no way he’s complaining when she’s staring at him, waiting on him to make the next move. There’s something carnal and hungry glinting behind the green of her eyes and it’s sending him through a tailspin of emotions.

“Lydia,” he repeats her name once more as his lone hand falls to the dip of her back. “I missed you so fucking much.”

He can see that she’s almost crying now, but it only polishes the yearning of _more_ between them. Her skin is wiped free from every residue of makeup, her eyes are gleaming with tears and her hair has flattened from the rain. She’s so vulnerable, so bare beneath his jersey and her façade and she’s in his room, wanting him to touch her.

He’s in love with every version of her, but this is the one that made him realize it.

“Show me it then, Stiles,” she says, bringing his hesitant hand upwards so that he’s now fully cupping her breast. “C’mon, show me just how much you missed me.”

Stiles shows it to her in three different ways. The first time is something inherently venereal and animalistic as he fucks her bare, bruising the entire pathway between the shell of her ear and the valley between her breasts with his lips. The second time is steady and slow since the residual effects of the first time are still buzzing throughout their bodies as they just _move_ together.

The third is where they both cry from its reverence because they almost lost one another to the world they’re trapped in. He splays kisses on her scars, no matter where or how many there are, and she presses her lips against his clammy forehead as he comes with a stutter inside her, telling her how much he loves her along the way. His head dips against her chest, pressing lazy kisses against the violet blotches he created with his mouth earlier.

When she combs her fingers through his sweaty hair and reveals through a whisper in his ear that she missed him “so much” too, Stiles is once again certain that he’d go through every hell and get burned trying just to hear her breathe that against him again.

**—**

**present.**

Eventually, he gets a fake ID so that he can go to the bar and get shitfaced without the possibility of his dad walking in on him. He’s fairly sure that Adam, one of his fellow benchwarmers on the lacrosse team, gives it to him as a sympathy gift but it’s okay. All Stiles had to do was take a front-facing picture of his face in front of random blue sheets he found in the linen closet and presto, he’s 22 years old and from Hillsboro, Oregon.

When he gets it in the mail, he realizes that his picture is sad at best. Violet circles mar the amber of his eyes, his skin is a waxy gray and his dark hair is overgrown and unkempt with an obvious absence of gel to tame it.

However, the fake still gets him tons of alcohol and lots of messy sex.

The first girl he sleeps with post-Lydia’s death is a college co-ed named Abigail. She’s blonde and leggy, and has warm brown eyes that bore into his own when he fucks her up against the mirror in the bar’s bathroom.

Abigail looks nothing like her, but he still kisses her left hip as if she has scars there from Peter Hale when he goes down on her, and moans her name when he finishes instead of Abigail’s. He does this for the next three girls he has sex with, and they usually hit him afterwards and call him various slanderous names as they immediately shove their tight dresses back down.

The last girl has long auburn hair, so he can’t help it when he tells her how much he loves her and how he wants to make her feel _so good, Lydia, so god damn good._ Not surprisingly, the girl pushes him away far enough away that he pulls out of her, scoffing in disgust as she stomps out of the stall with her underwear still around her ankles.

Stiles collapses into a drunken heap on the floor, and the only sounds he can hear is the music reverberating through the cinder block and his wretched sobs pounding against his ears.

“I can’t be good for you, Lyds,” he cries, slurring as he does so. “I can’t fucking do it without you here.”

He vomits profusely right after and eventually falls asleep in a puddle of it comprised of his own tears.

It’s 11:43 on a stormy March night, it’s been exactly two months since Lydia Martin died and since Stiles Stilinski was on his way to do the same.

—

**2012.**

“ _B_ ecause I think you look really beautiful when you cry.”

—

**present.**

Scott comes by often. He calls even more.

Stiles doesn’t wake up or pick up. Just allows Scott to sit on the foot of his bed and grasp his forearm until Scott’s veins swirl with obsidian and he’s gasping for air.

He catches Scott sob to him almost a month after the fact, after he collapses next to Stiles on the bed, when both of their pain becomes just _too_ much for Scott to take on his own.

“Fuck, I’m so sorry, Stiles,” he pants. “You and Lydia were my best friends, and I couldn’t save either of you. I’m so, so sorry–”

He hears her name being spoken from Scott’s mouth, and he can’t control how he breaks after that. There’s nothing that Scott can do to vanquish the heaving cries that wrack Stiles’ frail body. Instead, he joins him, enveloping his best friend in an embrace that can do nothing but attempt to heal what has broken them.

He knows that Scott can smell all the booze and piss that has become of him and it’s probably way more pungent than it would be to his human father, but that’s Scott; either he doesn’t try to notice, or he ignores it because all he cares about is saving everyone.

That’s why he feels so guilty about Lydia, and is hell-bent on trying to save Stiles from himself.

It’s been awhile since he’s even contemplated it, but this has to be the in-between Lydia was talking about right before she told him she loved him for the first and last time.

—

**Late 2013.**

“ _L_ yds?”

“Hm?”

They’re tangled in his flannel sheets, his nose snug against her hair as he presses languid kisses to her bare shoulder. Her arm is wrapped behind her so that she can play with the hair near the nape of his neck. She’s occasionally grasping his chin and bringing it towards her so his mouth can meld with her own, but Stiles is thinking. Even though it’s 4 a.m. and they are spent and boneless in each other’s arms, he can’t stop his mind from wandering to its inevitable question.

“Do you think that if we hadn’t gotten involved in this supernatural shit show, we’d be where we are now?”

“Pertaining to us or in general?”

“In general,” he says quickly. “No, fuck– I mean us. Definitely us.”

She throws her head back against him with a little laugh. He wastes no time pressing a single kiss into her hair as he awaits her answer.

“Of course. We’re emotional tethers and what not.”

He sighs.

“Lydia, that’s an entirely supernaturally based explanation.”

It’s stiff and silent for a few moments. Stiles is about to dismiss the conversation entirely, but then Lydia flips around so she can face him and she’s so close _again_. He can feel the shallowness of her breath fan onto the top of his lip and the taut peaks of her breasts graze against his chest, and he wants to revel in this picture forever. Lydia, naked in every sense of the word, with waves of strawberry blonde mussed on his pillow and green eyes boring into his own.

He’s stripped of everything logical and sensible, because he’s so goddamn in love with her and doesn’t even care what brought them together at this point. If the supernatural gods happened to be the cause, then he wants to thank them for what she whispers against his lips next.

“Not to me it isn’t.”

—

**present.**

He wakes up to the sight of streetlights blaring in the darkness and the sound of glass hastily clinking against the hardwood.

“Scott?”

There’s no reply. Only further shuffling and glass being shoved around to fulfill a response. When Stiles flips over on the opposite side of the bed, he notices that the sheets are cold with sustainable absence. More importantly, he sees Scott rummaging through the remnants under his bed, which almost all consist of empty liquor bottles.

He panics.

“Scott, what the hell are you doing?”

But Stiles knows what he’s doing. He’s evaluating the label of each bottle and then realizing that 80 percent of Stiles’ body composition is made up of booze and unadulterated despair now. He’s not entirely Stiles; he hasn’t been for a while now. But it’s not due to some supernatural evil residing inside and controlling his mind this time. It’s for entirely human and inevitable reasons, which makes it all the more agonizing for him to comprehend that Scott now can see what a pitiful shell he’s made of himself.

“Jesus, Stiles. I knew I smelled it on you last night, but I thought it was just a one night, binge thing. I didn’t know it was this bad,” Scott says, inspecting each empty bottle and lining them up around him like a ritual circle. So far there’s 48 around him, one for almost each day she’s been gone, all staggering in size and levels of poison.

Stiles doesn’t answer, keeping his gaze locked upwards at the solar system mobile he got for his ninth birthday instead. It’s spinning, and right now Stiles wishes it was real and that he could hop on it, disappear from everyone and everything. Except for her.

“Well?”

“I prefer to call it an ‘unorthodox method of coping’.”

“Fuck off, Stiles,” Scott seethes, and the unexpectedness of it makes Stiles shrink. “The problem is that this is completely orthodox. Your dad drank like this when we were eight years old, and now you’re eighteen and doing the exact same thing. Does that not faze you? Or are you just–”

“What do you want me to say? That it doesn’t hurt? That I’m just doing this for shits and giggles?” he roars, finally feeling something warm and red swell inside him. “Because I can’t say that.”

He knows Scott’s looking at the floor, wide-eyed and worrisome at Stiles’ white knuckles grasping the sheets beneath him. But _screw_ keeping up appearances. The anger from everything is now uncontrollably bubbling out of him and Stiles couldn’t stop it now even if he wanted to.

“It fucking _hurts_ , Scott, alright? She told me she loved me, then the next second she’s dead in my arms and now it hurts like hell. So don’t act like we haven’t been in the same boat.”

And even with that, Scott, his best friend, still can’t look at him.

“You couldn’t even look at me for months after Allison, and now you still can’t look at me,” he laughs bitterly. “Look how the tables fucking turn.”

He knows it’s a low blow, but he desperately wants Scott to just understand him. Understand why his skin is ashen, why there’s almost 50 empty liquor bottles hidden under his bed and why he just _can’t_ move on. He has to have Scott look at him and wonder how it all got so fucked this time around.

It’s still and silent for a few moments, but eventually he does.

“Stiles,” he begins, sounding careful and calculated and not at all like himself. “Hurting yourself won’t bring her back.”

Stiles scoffs, standing up from the bed and shucking off his undershirt as Scott watches him tensely.

“I know that–”

“ _No_ , you don’t,” Scott cuts him off, matching Stiles’ tone moments before. “You think drinking will ease the pain, that it will help you forget. But it won’t, because there’s no amount of alcohol that will ever make you forget her.”

Stiles goes rigid immediately. From the wistful way he speaks, Stiles has to wonder if Scott, the loyal, selfless alpha and by all means Stiles’ polar opposite; isn’t so different from himself.

“I know I don’t necessarily need to say it, but it’s _Lydia_ , Stiles. It will always hurt, just like me with Allison,” Scott says, his last sentence being proven by the way his voice trips over the syllables in her name like it physically wounds him.

He also says it like it’s the easiest thing in the world to comprehend. In some ways, it is.

“So how do you go on, Scotty?” Stiles questions, still keeping his back towards Scott. “How do you live with it?”

He’s preparing for a dismal answer like _you don’t_ or _you just continue drinking,_ but Scott still remains effervescently hopeful in spite of the machinations of this world that have tried to prove him otherwise. But what Scott tells him, smiling through watery eyes, actually makes somewhat perfect sense.

Because it’s what Lydia commanded him to do right before she left and sometimes the world is nice enough to give you a second reminder through someone as lion-hearted and pure as Scott McCall.

“You spend each day trying make her proud. And then it doesn’t hurt so much.”

—

**2013.**

" _I_ read once that holding your breath can stop a panic attack… So, when I kissed you… You held your breath."

"I did?"

"Yeah…You did."

—

**present.**

There are at least five steps in concealing a crime. The first step? _Get rid of the evidence._

When Scott helps him dispose of the empty bottles and pours out the half-empties in his bathroom sink, Stiles can’t help but feel criminal. Besides the obvious reason of _destroying his life_ and whatever spiel Scott goes in circles about, they do this to prevent Stiles’ dad from discovering it. It feels wrong, keeping something as monumental as this away from his father, but he knows that he’ll start blaming himself and Stiles _can’t_ have that happen.

Because correlation does not imply causation. Not when his self-destruction was inevitable from the second Lydia started to bleed out.

Stiles grimaces from the doorway when he stares at the varying hues of liquor streaming into the drain, but he also feels Scott’s eyes burn white into the side of his head and knows he has to comply.

It takes a few weeks or so of rough acclimation, but Stiles starts becoming a regular at pack meetings once again. It’s tough at first, as talking to anyone but Scott nowadays is like swallowing sandpaper. But there’s an ease about it. Most of the pack meetings consist of oven pizza that tastes like cardboard, movie marathons and all of them sprawling in Scott’s living room.

His mind temporarily wanders to darker places again when he thinks about how there hasn’t been any supernatural threats in the last few months since Lydia left and took the fabric of his soul along with her.

Timing really is a bitch.

He’d be lying if he said the pain hasn’t ebbed in the slightest since then. He stops ignoring his dad and starts going with him to the station, sitting in his dad’s office for hours on end reading random case files. Most of the crimes are petty crimes, ranging from tire slashing to convenience store shoplifting, but it distracts Stiles and lets him revel in normalcy as he rattles off conjecture to his dad.  

His dad lets him ramble and swear up and down excessively though, actually smiling as he does because his son is being woven back together with the same red string that tore him apart.

It’s still very much present, but mostly it’s a dull ache that stings and stabs when he’s exceptionally vulnerable. His insomnia has become somewhat acceptable (he falls asleep around 4 a.m. rather than never) and he isn’t thrashing in his sheets, screaming her name as his dad restrains him from scratching his skin red and raw anymore.

He still thinks of her though. Every second of every day. That’s not something he can alter though, because 1.) He did that anyways prior to her death and 2.) He still loves her, achingly so.

Even something as permanent as death doesn’t eradicate the human emotion of love. His father taught him that when he was seven years old and clinging onto him as his mom’s heart gave out on a hospital cot. With the gold band snug on his ring finger to this day, his dad’s never did.

Whether it’s a result of genetics or not, Stiles knows that as long as it concerns Lydia, his heart won’t either.

—

**2012.**

“ _I_ t’s like it’s on the tip of my tongue but I don’t know how to trigger it. I swear to god, it literally makes me want to scream.”

She swivels to face him with a wild look in her eyes that desperately seeks reassurance. She could very well kill him, the vulnerable human, with the sheer volume of it but Stiles trusts her with his life. Because contrary to Lydia’s belief, he’s always known that she’s actually the one who always figures it out.

“Okay Lydia, scream. Lydia _scream_.”

And she does. It tears and burns holes through both the sky and his ear drums but her body sags against him in relief afterwards and she _figures_ it out.

The streetlight above them releases crimson sparks into the air as it detonates from the weight of the scream. He would come to regret that he didn’t pay more attention to it when it was right in front of him, bare and ready for him to do so.

—

**present.**

Stiles applies to Stanford a day before the application is due, with Scott hovering over his shoulder like the alpha father-figure he is.

Stanford was Lydia’s “dream” school, and it feels both wrong and right when he clicks on the “submit” button after he fills out his extracurricular activities and cumulative GPA; normal things that constitute the average college freshman that resides anywhere but Beacon Hills. But Stiles tries his best to pretend for the application’s sake.  

Once Scott leaves for the night, he starts a second application under her name. He knows her like the back of his hand, so it isn’t particularly hard for him to note her multiple accolades and extracurriculars or compose an essay, answering the prompt by writing about a time she experienced “monumental failure” and how it affected her.

He submits her application a few minutes shy of midnight, with blood and devastation heavy on his mind.

Two weeks later in April, Stiles arrives home from a pack meeting to find two envelopes from bright and shiny Palo Alto in his mailbox. Both have the Stanford University seal stamped on them.

He doesn’t even make it into the house before he tears them both open with his teeth, trying to ignore the starch taste of glue and her name printed on the envelope as he grasps the letters with shaky hands.

_Dear Mr. Stilinski,_

_Congratulations! It is with great pleasure that I offer you admission to the Stanford University Freshmen Class of 2014._

And not surprisingly, the same wording appears on her letter. Clutching the letters against his erratically beating heart, he allows himself a moment to obsess over this life he could’ve had with her.

They could’ve lived in the same dorm building, only separated by a floor, and spent nights together in their tiny dorm beds on the weekends. They could’ve eaten shitty cafeteria food together and walked to most of their classes, because the biosciences and criminology buildings were on the same edge of campus.

They could’ve fought over the most inconsequential things but it wouldn’t matter because in the end, he’d always crawl into her bed before dawn. He’d murmur apologies and “I love you’s” into her neck as she would bring their clasped hands to her mouth and silently forgive him by placing small kisses on them. They could’ve, but they can’t now.

Once he collects himself by recounting his fingers, he takes both letters up to his room and pins them next to each other on the corkboard above his desk. He stares at them side by side and still feels a sense of discomfort in the simplistic commemoration of her and this life. He solves it when he pins a stray piece of red yarn between the two letters and thus bridging the gap between their worlds now.

“I’m going to Stanford, Lyds,” he says to himself, unable to keep his eyes and fingers off the red connecting them. “I’m going to be good for you.”

—

**2013.**

“ _N_ o, no, no, no, no. Come on Lydia, wake up! Come on, wake up. Can you hear me, Lydia? Lydia, open your eyes. Come on, come on. Come on. Listen to me, Lydia. Hey, show me your eyes, okay? Lydia, you have to open your eyes.”

She’s gone, and then she’s miraculously not in a matter of few seconds. But those few seconds are more than enough for Stiles to lose his mind because now in Deaton’s clinic, she’s staring at him in a way that mirrors his exact feelings. Like losing him would be worse than death itself.

He asks her if she’s okay more than a few times, because he’s Stiles and he hasn’t lived a life where he wasn’t constantly making sure she was. Scott and Deaton are completely eradicated from his periphery as he helps her sit up, never losing sight of her as he does. He doesn’t notice how she’s grasping his hand like a lifeline, how she shakily runs her thumb over his own or how she never stops looking at any part of him; even when her mom replaces him by holding her.

“They saved my life, Mom,” she says as her mom strokes her hair. “Stiles saved me.”

His heart stammers upwards of his throat. He wants to crash against her, tell her through words meant for only them to hear that she saves him in every possible way just by existing as Lydia Martin. He wants to tell her that he loves her, but not with the boyish obsession of putting her on an impossible pedestal in which he used to. He loves her in the way where you don’t know when or how it started, but you do know that it will never stop.

He sees so much of her, but still fails to notice that behind her own eyes, she’s reminding herself of the same thing.

—

**present.**

He doesn’t know when or how the topic comes up. But he is aware that Deaton is already sitting at Scott’s dining room table when they come back from the movie theatre, which is unusual considering the lack of formality in the pack meetings nowadays. And Deaton’s attire, still clad in his lab coat and typical aloof expression, screams of formality.

When they see him, the laughter from Liam tripping on his shoelaces outside ceases and the mood in the room automatically dims. Because as intelligent and astronomically helpful Deaton has been in the past, he does tend to take on the “bearer-of-bad-news” role whether it’s intentional or not.

“Deaton,” Scott says, instinctively sticking out a protective arm in front of them. “What are you doing here?”

“I just have some relatively new information to relay to you all,” Deaton says. But by the way he’s twiddling his thumbs and locking his eyes anywhere but their faces, it has to be more than just some “relatively new information.” 

“Well start spilling, Doc,” Stiles interrupts, in effort to make Deaton leave so he can show Scott a pirated version of the latest Star Wars movie. “Because I haven’t peed since before the movie and that blue Slurpee went straight to my bladder–”

“Stiles, go. It’d be best if you weren’t here for this part.”

Everything goes silent, and the panic Stiles has become all too familiar with resettles in his gut. All Stiles can picture from then on are her contorted limbs and frozen blue lips digging into the mud, and he just _knows_.

“It’s about Lydia, isn’t it?”

It’s still again as Deaton mashes his lips together, unsure of how to properly string his next sentence together.

“Yes, it’s about Lydia.”

“Then I’m staying right here.”

Scott latches his fingers onto his wrist, pressing white with his thumb and forefinger.

“Stiles–”

Stiles jerks his wrist out of Scott’s hold and looks at him incredulously, as if Scott offended him with the mere thought of him leaving the room.

“It’s _Lydia,_ Scott. I’m not leaving.”

Scott relocates his grip onto Stiles’ wrist, apprehension clear in his brown eyes. Instead of removing it, he grabs ahold of Scott’s hand and rubs a small yet firm circle on his palm. It’s an intimate, private moment. He just wants to let Scott know that there is no way in hell he is leaving this conversation. Even when he already knows that staying will undoubtedly hurt more.

Scott grimaces at Stiles, and then nods at Deaton to continue.

“Years ago, when I was first starting out at this clinic, I had a little boy and his parents come in with the family dog,” Deaton says. “The dog was hit by a truck and was dead upon arrival, but the parents still took the dog to me, because the boy would not give up the belief that the dog could be saved.”

An eerie nostalgia settles over the room, because the story Deaton is describing is almost parallel to Eichen House, Lydia with a bloody hole drilled into her head not breathing on the clinic table and _Lydia, show me your eyes okay?_

Stiles looks at the doorway leading to the living room, already contemplating escape because his lungs are suddenly throbbing with an impending anxiety attack. He doesn’t, though, because he’ll always come back for Lydia.

_You came back._

“I saw how much that dog meant to that boy, and how he would’ve done anything for the dog’s heart to beat again,” he continues. “So me, still new to supernatural world as well, instantly thought of the concept of emotional tethers and how they can be used–”

“–to bring you back,” Stiles murmurs at the realization. “Even from the dead.”

“Precisely.”

He’s overwhelmed with masses of questions and conflicting emotions, because the life with Lydia he constructed with red yarn was this delusional pipe dream only a few minutes ago. But now Deaton has just waltzed into Scott’s kitchen after months of Stiles lamenting in booze and hollow sex, and suddenly it’s a possibility? It should enrage him, should make him scream a resounding “fuck you” at Deaton for only showing up when it’s too late, but he can’t find the will to do so.

Because delayed or not, the future with Lydia isn’t hopeless anymore. On the contrary, it’s now gleaming with bright white hope.

“So, you’re saying we can bring Lydia back?” Scott prods, noticing Stiles’ shell-shocked expression.

“I’m not saying it’s set in stone, but it’s a strong possibility,” Deaton clarifies. “And not just anyone. Stiles has to be the one to bring her back.”

He doesn’t know why he gasps when he hears that, because the fact that he and Lydia were (are?) emotional tethers wasn’t an unknown one. That’s why the despair of losing her, although humanly inevitable from the loss, consumed him like a belittling and suicidal parasite. But bringing Lydia back from the _dead_? That kind of power intimidates him, even as an emotional tether.

But he’s _her_ emotional tether, and he can bring her back. She loves him, and the life that was bonded with cardstock paper and red string can now become a reality because _he_ can make her alive again.

“So what are we waiting for? Let’s bring her back,” Stiles says, already almost knocking over the fern plant in the corner on his way out the door.

“Hold on. I haven’t gotten to the various stipulations that can result from such an extreme method.”

“What ‘stipulations’ would even matter at this point?” Stiles irritably questions. “Lydia would be brought back to us, to _me_. Do you have any idea how monumental this is?”

“That’s exactly why I didn’t want you in here at first. You’d be irrational from the get-go,” Deaton carefully explains. “In order to bring Lydia back, we’d have to do a similar procedure to when we first attempted to save your parents from the Darach.”

He mulls it over for a few seconds before he hears the revolted gasps and sounds of misery that emit from the pack. When he realizes the weight of Deaton’s words, he immediately senses the familiar rush of bile racing up his throat.

“So, you’re saying we’d have to dig up Lydia’s _dead_ body, and I’d have to hold her _dead_ body under water for god knows how long?”

“Essentially, yes.”

Stiles almost collapses at the thought of holding Lydia’s dead, partially decomposed body underwater for hours. In a way, he’d be drowning her; killing her all over again, only with his own hands.

“And there’s a strong possibility that it won’t work?” he reluctantly asks.

“Again, yes.”

Stiles contemplates this, ignoring the muffled _Stiles, listen to me_ being whispered by Scott and the uncharacteristic _Stiles, don’t make a rash decision_ Malia pleads into his ear. But neither attract his attention nor convince him, because they aren’t his emotional tethers. Lydia solely is, and he’s going to bring her back using it.

“If there’s any chance, I’ll take it,” he asserts. “We’ll take it.”

Deaton sighs, but not in irritation. Almost like he regrets bringing this information forward, because now Stiles is unwaveringly hopeful and irrational and it’s painful to tell him otherwise when he looks like this _._

“Again, I said there are various stipulations.”

Stiles huffs in annoyance.

“Well, what else is there?”

“ _If_ we were able to reverse Lydia from death, the effects from it would certainly remain,” Deaton explains. “It’d be miraculous if they were mild at best.”

“So what are we talking about, mildly speaking?” Scott says, piping up from the background before Stiles can tear into Deaton and his vague answers.

“At its most mild case, which again is rare, she wouldn’t be able to retain normal body temperature. She’d be in a constant in-between state of hot and cold.”

Instantly, Stiles is back kneeling between the trees where he held her body in his arms, and how warm she was when her heart was beating. And suddenly, she’s frigid to the touch with the absence of a heartbeat.

_But Stiles, there is an in-between. You aren’t leaving Scott or your dad for me._

“And?” Malia asks, gripping Stiles shoulder in trepidation. “Severely speaking?”

“More plausibly, she would most likely remember you all, but she wouldn’t be able to speak or show any signs of affection. Since she experienced death firsthand, this only strengthens the power of a banshee,” he says. “All she’d be able to listen to is screams of death from practically across the whole state of California, but she wouldn’t be able to communicate this to you all. She wouldn’t even be able to scream to release herself from this.”

_I swear to God, it literally makes me want to scream._

It hurts imagining it, because this isn’t the life he had planned out with her. His pipe dream has once again burst into a goddamn flood, because he almost lost everything civilized and humane within him when she was catatonic and it was only over a two week span. A lifetime without their banter, her critique of his flannel choices and her way of soothing him with tender lips during 3 a.m. panic attacks is already excruciating enough. But continuing to live like this, only with her as a hollow shell, seems worse.

Lydia always possessed an extraordinary form of intelligence, wit and kindness. Even when she ignored his existence or antagonized him with biting comments, Stiles would still scorn those who reduced Lydia to anything less than what she was because he saw _her_ through it all. Now he’s going to join the leagues of Jackson and Peter, because he’s going to reduce her to something small for his own selfish benefit.

He wants to scream himself, feel the edges of his throat sear with pain and anguish as his lungs expand for the last time, but he can’t do it.

“So you’re saying she’d be a walking vegetable, correct?” Liam inquires bluntly, which earns glare from Scott and a growl from Malia.

“Although we wouldn’t know until the ritual is completely over, she very well could be.”

He can feel Scott’s eyes on him, but he can’t bring himself look back at him when all he can see is obsidian. He can’t he can’t.

“Stiles, it’s all up to you.”

_You’re the one who always figures it out._

He can’t be good for her. He can’t he can’t he can’t.

“Stiles, you okay?” he hears Deaton ask, and suddenly he feels multiple hands raking all over his face and shoulders with affectionate concern. It suffocates him instead and suddenly he feels like he’s with Lydia, buried six feet under dirt and rock because he _can’t_ breathe.

_We still have time, right? Stiles? Are you okay?_

“I can’t do this, I can’t I can’t–”

He rips out of everyone’s hold like a rabid animal and stumbles in a beeline out of Scott’s house, avoiding answering the desperate shouts of his name. He also ignores the sound of crimson ceramic shattering around the green fern leaves as he knocks the plant over, despising Beacon Hills’ ability to smother and isolate him all at once.

—

**2011.**

“ _U_ h, anyways… I always thought we just had this kind of connection– unspoken, of course.”

—

**present.**

The paint on the walls of the kitchen is peeling.

He’s sitting at his kitchen table, idly watching the alabaster chips blow onto the floor by the ceiling fan’s force, and counting how many tiny specks actually land near his feet. So far, he’s counted 24; 12 for each hour he’s been doing this. Soon enough, he finds himself multiplying them, then dividing them fleck by fleck.

Math was never his strong suit (that’s always been up Lydia’s alley), but it’s an ample method of distraction that’s especially crucial right now. He’s been distracting himself ever since he bolted out of Scott’s house hours before. It was still sunlight outside when he sprinted four blocks to his own house, but now the sky is oozing with shades of rose and lilac that’s common for the month of May in California. He wouldn’t know, though, because he’s been trying to distract himself by using paint flecks as math equations but it’s not working because the only thing elementary algebra reminds him of is _her._

The paint flecks begin to resemble each aspect of Lydia, and how he’s counting them instead trying to fit them back together. It rocks waves into his core, but he’s speechless. He’s screamed, cried, shouted, and wailed enough to last him two lifetimes.

He’s so set on trying to pretend that this doesn’t affect him, that seeing Lydia’s dead body every time he blinks does nothing to him, that he doesn’t notice his dad’s shoes stepping on the paint chips.

“Stiles?”

His head automatically snaps up as he sees his dad standing in front of him in his sheriff uniform, its shoulder speaker still fuzzily sounding incoherent questions. All that can be heard is the phrase, _“find your son?”_

“Yeah Parrish, I found him. Stand by,” his dad orders into the speaker with his eyes still locked on Stiles. There’s a small murmur of agreement from Parrish’s end, before the crackling of the radio dies out and the lull of silence overcomes them once again.

“So… you were going to call a search party on me?”

“Scott called me. Said you ran out of his house,” he explains. “Which is odd, because usually Melissa and I have the problem of you guys running _into_ each other’s’ houses too much.”

“Yeah, well, Scott has always been the melodramatic type,” Stiles snorts. “I just ate too many Hershey bars at the movie and had to leave, you know how sensitive my stomach can be to lactose–”

“Son, while I usually admire your remarkable skill of worming your way out of conversations, there’s no way in hell you’re worming out of this one.”

Stiles stares into his dad’s eyes, and he instantly knows that _he_ knows. It makes him cower as he looks down at his hands knotting together, feeling his knuckles retract and tense when he fully realizes that he can’t flee his own house. Not when his dad is in front of him, waiting for him to talk when he was mute only moments before.

He decides to let his wounds pour out in the open by ripping off the Band-Aid that holds them in.

“I can bring Lydia back to life.”

He lets out a long awaited breath and it’s almost peaceful, the tension surrounding them detonating from his revelation. But then chair across from him screeches as his dad pulls it out, now intently sitting across from him.

“Okay,” he starts, trying to grapple the possibility. “Is this because of your emotional– what is it again? Connection?”

“Tether. We have an emotional tether,” Stiles corrects.

“And you can bring her back to life, just by using that?”

“Yes.”

Sighing, his dad brings his forefinger and thumb to rub against the bridge of his nose, as if he’s trying to make sense of this. He can’t. Stiles knows it shouldn’t make sense, that it doesn’t make sense. Yet, it’s still real.

“Okay, alright,” his dad says. “So why haven’t you yet?”

He squints at his dad, not fully understanding the flippant way he’s saying it.

“What?”

“I mean, Stiles– we both know that you would, and _have_ , jumped over cliffs and ran into fires for her no questions asked, even when I had a ton,” he says, wincing. “So the fact that you haven’t instantly jumped at this means that something has to be wrong with it. Right?”

Right. Everyone’s always right when he’s all wrong inside.

“Yeah, right,” he says.

“So tell me son, what’s wrong with it?”

He almost wants to keep it inside, keep the salt buried in the wounds because it will become all the more real and dire if he lets it bleed out. But his dad’s reaching out, his calloused hand now covering his own with sheer faith beaming in his eyes and Stiles can’t hide this from him. Even when that’s all he wants to do.

“I can bring her back to life, but there’s a huge possibility it would be bad,” he starts, his hands fumbling. “Like, it’s more likely that she would be a vegetable than how she was. All she’d be able to do is listen to people screaming for their lives and that wouldn’t be, it just wouldn’t–”

“It wouldn’t be Lydia,” his dad finishes for him.

“Right.”

His hands tremor in his dad’s grasp, but his dad alleviates this with the gentle kneading of his own hands. He doesn’t feel suffocated anymore, only dazed and sorry that he can’t do more.

“Stiles,” his dad begins. “What are three things that you loved about Lydia?”

“I can only name three?” he says, ignoring how his dad used the past tense when it’s still very much the present tense for him.

His dad gives him a pointed look, so Stiles draws in a long breath before he delves into finding just three of the unlimited reasons why he _loves_ her.

“Well, even though she thought otherwise, she was the one who could figure out anything. Even if she had no idea what the hell it was at first,” he says, chuckling slightly while reminiscing about bear traps and Riemann’s hypothesis. “She was _so_ smart. Like genius, 170 IQ, scares-you-shitless kind of smart. She was also witty, and always challenged me whenever she got the chance. Even when it annoyed the hell out of me, I still adored it, and her, no matter what.”

He has to swallow his grief, taste it through the salty tears streaming down his cheeks once more before he can continue.

“And even when I killed her best friend and almost killed mine, she still believed in me. She never stopped believing that it wasn’t my fault, even when I still live every day like it is,” he chokes out. “Scott told me the same thing, but he still couldn’t look at me for months afterwards. Lydia kept looking at me, and then never stopped.”

For a brief but necessary moment, they sit in the quiet. Until his dad tugs on his trembling hand, forcing Stiles to still and look up at him from under his eyelashes. His dad has matching streaks of tears on his face, but he’s also gleaming with reverence and pride through a watery smile.

“What?”

“That’s exactly how I feel about your mother,” he says, using the back of Stiles hand to wipe the tears that are still leaking from his eyes. “Stiles, I don’t think I ever told you this, but I was already planning to take your mother off of life support before she died on her own.”

Suddenly, Stiles is 7 years old again with his dad’s hands covering his ears in effort to prevent him from hearing the flatlining of his mother’s heartbeat. His dad is crying above him, and he doesn’t understand. But he’s eighteen now, and he understands.

“You never told me that.”

“You were _so_ young at the time. It’s just something that no 7-year-old would or should ever understand,” his dad rationalizes. “But I knew that she was going to die anyways, because it wouldn’t have been worth it.”

This time, Stiles doesn’t even try to suppress the downpour of tears.

“What wouldn’t have been worth it?” he asks, even though he’s certain he knows the answer already.

“Stiles, your mother was a spitfire. She was so bright and courageous, like Lydia,” he says, squeezing his son’s hand when he says her name. “And she loved you so damn much. So when she couldn’t even recognize you anymore, I knew I had to let her go. Your mother had a lot of pride. And like Lydia, I knew it would’ve killed her more if she saw herself like that.”

He realizes what his dad is advising him to do. It’s something he was thinking from the start, but he still held some sort of unabashed hope that he was wrong somehow, that making Lydia alive again would end up okay. But that white light has faded, and it’s okay. He’d rather spend his life mourning over her loss than have her live as someone unrecognizable and small.

Lydia is going to remain in the ground, and it’s okay now.

“I love you, Dad,” Stiles sobs, leaning over the table so he can be seven one more time and hold onto his dad until it feels okay.

His dad immediately echoes this, leaning his head in the crook of his shoulder as he hugs him back. When Stiles glances at the window with bleary eyes, he sees a sky seeping with hues of orange and blue and a red stream cutting across it. Somehow it reassures him that wherever Lydia is, she’s not only okay with his decision, but she loves him even more for it.

It’s starting to be enough for him.

—

**2011.**

“ _L_ ydia, I’ve had a crush on you since the third grade. And I know that somewhere inside that cold, lifeless exterior there’s an actual human soul. And I’m also pretty sure that I’m the only one who knows how smart you really are. Uh-huh– and that once you’re done pretending to be a nit-wit, you’ll eventually go off and write some insane mathematical theorem that wins you the Nobel Prize.”

She’s gaping at him like he just sliced her open and let her bleed out. In a way, he has.

Before he recants his statement, her ruby lips quirk up in a shy smile as she looks down. It’s an expression that in the years of learning Lydia Martin inside and out through mere observations, he has never been exposed to. He’s fairly certain that no one else has seen it either besides _him_ , right now.

“A Fields medal.”

Now he’s the one gaping at her.

“What?”

She gets up from her chair, effortlessly sauntering over to him like she finally has wings. To him, she’s had them for a while. But now she’s showing them to _him_ , Stiles Stilinski, of all people without any restrictions.

“Nobel doesn’t have a prize for mathematics,” she says, smirking from under her eyelashes. “A Fields Medal is the one I’ll be winning.”

Her effect on him is pretty much standard at this point, but this time, she’s not trying to leave him breathless. She just _does_. When she grabs his hand, leading him onto the gym floor to blend in with the mass of dancing bodies, he’s again reassured he’ll always be completely, stupidly and irrevocably infatuated with every facet that is Lydia Martin.

—

**present.**

He stands in front of his bulletin board every night, reading both their Stanford acceptance letters like a bedtime story book.

But now it’s a muggy afternoon in late May, and he’s reading them while dressed in black slacks, his white button-down and a burgundy tie to match his graduation gown and cap in his hand. And it’s not some sort of fable anymore; in three hours, he will be a high school graduate and in three months, he’ll be a part of the 2014 Stanford University freshman class.

It feels surreal, like he’s living some sort of euphoric illusion by not having her here to do this alongside him. Before they were something, they were scholars together. They solved more mysteries together than he can count on all his fingers and toes, but she won’t be walking across the high school auditorium’s stage to retrieve the diploma she deserves. She won’t be delivering her valedictorian speech, which he knows she would’ve stayed up all night to perfect, or beam at Stiles when the senior class erupts in applause, because he clapped for her when no one else did.

Thinking like this is what continues to hurt more than anything, so Stiles tries to remember what Scott told him only a few months ago when Stiles was weak and desolate.

_You spend each day trying make her proud. And then it doesn’t hurt so much._

And without a second thought, he unpins her acceptance letter from the board and rolls it up. He ties it together with the red string and stuffs it into his pocket underneath the graduation gown, so they can do something together one last time.

—

“Dude, did you hear that Mandy Nelson is the valedictorian?” is the first thing that Scott says when he hops in the passenger seat of the jeep.

“I thought she didn’t even pass sophomore English,” Stiles says, pulling into reverse and onto Scott’s street.

“Nah. She ended up passing with an A- because she gave that student teacher, Mr. Turner, a blowjob in the supply closet.”

Stiles winces, scrunching up his nose in disgust.

“Fucking Mandy Nelson,” he says as he turns onto the main road.

He glances over at Scott and notices immediately that not only are they matching with the standard maroon graduation gown, but also in the exact same brand and color of dress pants. He keeps it to himself, but it’s so fitting that it makes him slip a small smile.

“I don’t get why they didn’t just keep Lydia as the valedictorian,” Scott whines. “She still deserves it more than Mandy. Hell, _you_ deserve it more than Mandy.”

“Well fuck you too while we’re at it,” Stiles says, feigning offense as he brakes for the stoplight.

“Oh, you know what I mean. Really though, why aren’t you valedictorian? I thought you were the second in our class behind Lydia.”

Stiles glances up at the light and sees that it’s still a stationary red. _Unsolved._

“Oh, I’m still the second in our class,” he says nonchalantly. When he turns to look at Scott, he finds Scott with eyebrows furrowed and his mouth hanging open in confusion.

“What?”

“Why is Mandy our valedictorian then?”

“I told Principal Thomas not to give it to me, to give it to the person after me,” he explains. “I had no idea that person was fucking _Mandy Nelson_.”

The light blinks yellow, and Stiles pulls forward into the left turning lane warily. _To be determined._

“Stiles… why the hell would you do that?”

“Because Scott, it was Lydia’s thing, okay? She knew how to solve quadratic equations in the third grade. She may have pretended to be dumb for the better half of high school, but she deserved it,” he confesses, shoving his hand in his pocket and clutching the letter when he does so. “If anyone was going to take that from her, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be me.”

Scott is still gaping at him, but now with utter pride instead of bewilderment. The light flashes green, so Stiles skids into the turn onto another dirt road. _Solved._

“That’s incredible, man,” Scott says. “Lydia would’ve been so proud of you.”

The hand in his pocket was about to fly up to the steering wheel, but when Scott tells him that, he can’t help but unloop the red thread and tie it around his fingers.

“Don’t give me too much credit,” Stiles says modestly. “You would’ve done the same for Allison.”

He looks over at Scott, whose wistfully looking out the window at the cloudless evening sky. He wonders if he can see Lydia and Allison up there.

“That I would’ve,” he says, almost whispering.

It’s silent for a few minutes as Stiles continues on the road that’s void of all streetlights and other cars. The pine trees are becoming denser each mile and it brings him back to when they were powdered with light January snow and brimming with blood.

_Live each day to make her proud. Then it doesn’t hurt as much._

“Stiles, you sure you want to do this?” Scott questions as he pulls into the road that leads to the iron cemetery gate. Rows of weathered tombstones blur into one another other as he continues to drive down the road, despite Scott’s hesitance.

“It’s just something I need to do.”

When he says that, he can sense Scott now understanding it crystal clear.

The cemetery is enormous and long, so it takes them a few more minutes to pull into the small yet familiar grassy area next to the mausoleum. He hasn’t been here since January, and it feels somewhat strange to be in this place with a vastly different mindset than back then. It also feels odd to be here in a different season than the last, when he was certain that he wasn’t going to live past the spring.

But like he told Scott, he needs to do this. He needs to see Lydia before he walks across that stage without her.

He parks a few yards adjacent from where she is, getting out of the car while Scott stays inside it.

“You sure you don’t want to get out?”

“No it’s okay. I came here earlier to see Allison,” Scott says, waving him off. “This is for you.”

Stiles tugs his hand quickly while looking directly into Scott’s eyes, hoping he can see how thankful he is for him. When Scott squeezes back and grins at him, he knows that he can.

It only takes him a few long strides until he’s in front of her. Except now she merely exists through a 24” by 12” gravestone, with her name and generic titles engraved on it.

 

_In Memory of Lydia Grace Martin_

_Beloved Daughter and Friend_

_March 19, 1996 – January 21, 2014_

“Hey, Lyds. I hope everything is going okay down there,” he begins, looking down at his loafers as he fumbles with his fingers. “My dad did most of the talking when we would visit my mom, so I don’t really know how to go about this or if there’s any specific directions for doing this. But when was the last time I ever used instructions, right?”

He doesn’t know why he still expects her to retort when he’s literally talking to her gravestone, but it still stings when he receives silence from the other end.

“Right, so I guess I’ll get to it then. I have something to give to you, since you never really got the chance to apply to colleges or anything,” he says while searching the insides of his pockets. “It’s an acceptance letter from Stanford, _the_ Stanford University. You got in, Lyds. I never had a doubt you would though. I did doubt my ability to get in, though. The admissions board must’ve messed up, because I got in too.”

With shaky hands, he pulls the letter out of his pocket and uses the red string to tie it to the rose bouquet that’s already laid against her gravestone. When he takes a step back to just stare at what’s in front of him and how she’s been reduced to _this,_ a lone sob breaks out of his throat. He clamps his hand over his mouth so Scott won’t hear, because he needs this moment with her and he needs it to be _just_ with her.

“I didn’t come here to weep over your grave like some sort of cliché, but fuck, Lydia– we could’ve had a life together, ya’ know? We could’ve had one outside of Beacon Hills, without all the supernatural bullshit that killed you,” he says. “To be honest, I went off the deep end for a while. I did a lot of things that you wouldn’t have liked and believe me, I’m not proud of them either. But it was kind of inevitable. You were _it_ for me, Lydia.”

He knows that he has to leave for graduation soon, but he’s grounded here. Even when he’s roaming Palo Alto while she’s buried in the ground of Beacon Hills, something is always going to draw him back here, back to her. It could be a result of the emotional tether, but it’s not entirely. Lydia Martin is still _it_ for him.

 _It_ means that his love for her will never fade, even if he somehow, inconceivably, finds love again someday. She will always hold this piece of his heart. Or maybe it's him that will always hold a piece of hers, as long as he lives. And that thought almost makes him smile.

“I don’t exactly know how I’m still standing here, breathing while you’re not,” he admits. “But I am, and I’m going to make you proud. I’m going to go to Stanford, I’m going to study criminal justice, and I’m going to figure it out. I promise, I’ll make you so proud.”

He kisses his hand and allows the last of his tears coat it, while he brings it to rest over her name.

“Remember I love you,” he murmurs. “I always will.”

And he drags his feet through the grass behind him, never losing sight of her headstone until he goes behind the jeep to the driver’s side door.

He opens the door and knows Scott is staring at his red, blotchy cheeks marred with tear tracks. But he doesn’t mind, and he knows Scott doesn’t either.

“Are you okay?”

He hastily wipes his eyes with the back of his hand before he gazes through the windshield, up at the sky like Scott was doing on the drive over. He looks for green eyes and strawberry blonde hair among the clouds, before he turns to Scott and sees crossbows and Allison in his loyal brown eyes.

“I’m going to be,” he says truthfully.

Scott rubs his shoulder as Stiles drives to the high school, reminding him that he’ll be here even if it’s not okay. But Scott doesn’t need to worry, because now he’s revived with new life. Lydia was the one who believed he’d always figure it out, but he only starts to believe it now when he fully realizes that his brother is next to him, on the way to their high school graduation.

While Mieczyslaw ‘Stiles’ Stilinski has never been good at goodbyes, he’s figuring out how to get better at beginnings. He’s here and breathing, the streetlights on the road are burning bright against the nightfall and for now, it’s enough.

—

**2011.**

“ _H_ ey Lydia! You look– like you’re gonna ignore me…”

**Author's Note:**

> (Title card at the top of the work is from the work of the beautiful and talented Ronnie @songof-light.)
> 
> So this was started in July as an idea, then accelerated into something that's 17.1k, angsty as hell, and something I poured my total heart and soul into. I never got a feeling like this from writing anything in my life before, and I hope it translated well while you were reading it. Also, please don't hate me for this pile of angst. I hope it didn't make you cry too much! 
> 
> This is for the Stydia Big Bang, which is a huge burst of Stydia content over the next week. Please be sure to check out the 29 other wonderful fics, videos, gif sets, etc. throughout the week as well!
> 
> Mega thanks to my beautiful beta/relatable friend Jade (@LaughingSenselessly) for dealing with my rants and screaming messages about this, and also writing a little paragraph of this fic when I couldn't quite nail something down. You're amazing, and I love you endlessly.
> 
> Also HUGE shoutout to my impeccable artist Anne (@Sweetie2566) for willing to make me a video of this fic that I hold so dearly to my heart. I'm so honored that you're amazing, talented self is editing a [ video ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ysh7L9Na6s/) for _me_. You're beautiful and I love you. 
> 
> AND another huge thanks to Rachel, Kay and everyone else for organizing this. Thank you for doing so much for our fandom, even when we don't deserve it.
> 
> And with that, I leave you to hopefully leaving me some kudos/comments. I'm stilesprefers-screamers on Tumblr, and loveroflight24 on Twitter. Happy Canon Stydia!


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